jessica thalmann
Work
memories of a photograph I had not taken, 2011
In Memory: Something that happens after then, and before now
Labspace Studio
August 19 - 21
Curated by Annie Onyi Cheung, John Loerchner & Laura Mendes
Collaboration with Noelle Wharton-Ayer
As collaborators separated by time and space, Noelle Wharton-Ayer and Jessica Thalmann mailed letters, notes, drawings and postcards to one another over a period of 6 weeks. While Wharton-Ayer was tree planting in Northern Quebec, Thalmann froze in the cavernous walls of her Toronto gallery office.
Ruminating on a sense of place, both artists examine notions of a nomadic or diasporic sense of home using small details of poignant memories. Wharton-Ayer experiments with text, carbon paper, thread, colored pencils and a variety of treated papers. While Wharton-Ayer worked from the outside inwards using natural landscapes, trees, flowers, baseball, birds and family photographs; ThalmannŐs practice worked in the reverse. Starting with photographs taken by her mother at her grandparents 25 Anniversary, the artist extrapolates on the unstable nature of photography as it depicts a past that can never be truly captured or even relived but somehow seems etched in personal memory as if she had been there. Quoting Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and Art Spiegelman, the work places personal iconography alongside iconic images of comics and infamous cultural theorists.
